To deceive the Mulattoes the planters were trying tricks, but against the slaves they knew only one weapon – terror. The blacks had their stockades covered with the heads of white victims. The Colonial Assembly stuck the heads of Negroes on pikes placed all along the roads leading to Le Cap. When Boukman was killed (fighting bravely) the Assembly stuck up his head in Le Cap with a placard: ‘This is the head of Boukman, chief of the rebels.’ The whites built three scaffolds in Le Cap and broke twenty or thirty blacks on the wheel every day. With their usual disregard of the slave even as property they massacred all they met, even those on plantations which had not yet revolted. Masters denounced those who had helped them to escape. Slaves presenting themselves to their masters seeking refuge from the devastation of the countryside or merely because they were afraid or tired of revolution, were killed at sight. The result was that all, timid as well as bold, soon understood that there was no hope except with the revolution, and they flocked to join its ranks. In a few weeks the insurgents had grown to nearly 100,000.

[...] Toussaint had plenary powers, and in a vain attempt to break down the pride of the colonists he secretly reduced the number to be freed from 400 to 60.9 The colonists would not hear of it. Then and only then did Toussaint come to an unalterable decision from which he never wavered and for which he died. Complete liberty for all, to be attained and held by their own strength. The most extreme revolutionaries are formed by circumstances. It is probable that, looking at the wild hordes of blacks who surrounded him, his heart sank at the prospect of the war and the barbarism which would follow freedom even if it were achieved. He was ready to go a long way to meet the colonists. He probably hoped for some attempt at better treatment. But having been driven to take his decision, as was his way, he never looked back. [...]

Whatever the reservations they had made when they formed this pact with the bastard Mulattoes, the whites were now eager to cement the alliance and Roume was overwhelmed by the number of these appeals. Revolution, says Karl Marx, is the locomotive of history. Here was a locomotive that had travelled at remarkable speed, for in April 1792, not yet three years after the fall of the Bastille, the white Patriots in Port-au-Prince were being besieged by a composite army of royalist commandants, white planters, brown-skinned Mulattoes, and black slaves, none of them constrained but all for the time being free and equal partners. No doubt most of the rich were only awaiting the restoration of ‘order’ to put the slaves back in their places again, but the mere fact of the revolutionary association and the temporary equality meant that the old spell was broken and things would never be the same again.

[...] The monarchy in France had to be torn up by the roots. Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege. Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war. But although they were all white in France they fought just the same. The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes. The French Revolution laid the basis of modern France, the country as a whole being strong enough to stand the shock and profit by it, but so corrupt and rotten was the slave society of San Domingo that it could not stand any strain and perished as it deserved to perish.

That was the style, the accent of Toussaint and his men. The British and the Spaniards could not defeat it. All they could offer was money, and there are periods in human history when money is not enough.

It was in method, and not in principle, that Toussaint failed. The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental. There were Jacobin workmen in Paris who would have fought for the blacks against Bonaparte’s troops. But the international movement was not then what it is today, and there were none in San Domingo. The black labourers saw only the old slave-owning whites. These would accept the new régime, but never to the extent of fighting for it against a French army, and the masses knew this. Toussaint of course knew this also. He never trusted Agé, his Chief of Staff who was a Frenchman, and asked Agé‘s junior, Lamartinière, to keep an eye on him. But whereas Lenin kept the party and the masses thoroughly aware of every step, and explained carefully the exact position of the bourgeois servants of the Workers’ State, Toussaint explained nothing, and allowed the masses to think that their old enemies were being favoured at their expense. In allowing himself to be looked upon as taking the side of the whites against the blacks, Toussaint committed the unpardonable crime in the eyes of a community where the whites stood for so much evil. That they should get back their property was bad enough. That they should be privileged was intolerable. And to shoot Moïse, the black, for the sake of the whites was more than an error, it was a crime. It was almost as if Lenin had had Trotsky shot for taking the side of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

The hamartia, the tragic flaw, which we have constructed from Aristotle, was in Toussaint not a moral weakness. It was a specific error, a total miscalculation of the constituent events. Yet what is lost by the imaginative freedom and creative logic of great dramatists is to some degree atoned for by the historical actuality of his dilemma. It would therefore be a mistake to see him merely as a political figure in a remote West Indian island. If his story does not approach the greater dramatic creations, in its social significance and human appeal it far exceeds the last days at St Helena and that apotheosis of accumulation and degradation, the suicide in the Wilhelmstrasse. The Greek tragedians could always go to their gods for a dramatic embodiment of fate, the dike which rules over a world neither they nor we ever made. But not Shakespeare himself could have found such a dramatic embodiment of fate as Toussaint struggled against, Bonaparte himself; nor could the furthest imagination have envisaged the entry of the chorus, of the ex-slaves themselves, as the arbiters of their own fate. Toussaint’s certainty of this as the ultimate and irresistible resolution of the problem to which he refused to limit himself, that explains his mistakes and atones for them.

But Toussaint’s soldiers and generals, illiterates and ex-slaves, had been moulded by the same revolution. An army is a miniature of the society which produces it. If the black army had wobbled before the French, it was because San Domingo society as a whole did not know what to think of Leclerc’s expedition, could not believe its vile purpose. But the few thousand who remained faithful to Toussaint were the advance-guard of the revolutionary army fighting a revolutionary war. They were for the moment outnumbered. If Toussaint had the help of some of the labourers, thousands of Mulattoes and the former free were joining Leclerc. But the liberty and equality which these blacks acclaimed as they went into battle meant far more to them than the same words in the mouths of the French. And in a revolutionary struggle these things are worth many regiments.

The dishonest political position of the French Army was now taking its toll. The soldiers still thought of themselves as a revolutionary army. Yet at nights they heard the blacks in the fortress singing the Marseillaise, the Ça Ira, and the other revolutionary songs. Lacroix records how these misguided wretches as they heard the songs started and looked at the officers as if to say, ‘Have our barbarous enemies justice on their side? Are we no longer the soldiers of Republican France? And have we become the crude instruments of policy?’

A regiment of Poles, remembering their own struggle for nationalism, refused to join in the massacre of 600 blacks, ordered by Leclerc, and later, when Dessalines was reorganizing the local army, he would call one of his regiments the Polish regiment.

All that the old gang would do was to threaten Leclerc. Some of the blacks who had been slaves attempted to purchase their freedom from their former masters. These refused, and singled out as their private property high officials and officers, men who had shed their blood on the battlefield and served with distinction in the administration. Christophe told General Ramel that if he thought slavery was to be restored, he would burn the whole of San Domingo to the ground. A black general dining with Lacroix pointed to his two daughters and asked him, ‘Are these to go back to slavery?’ It was as if they could not believe it. So your liberal or social-democrat hesitates and dithers until the sledge-hammer of Fascism falls on his head, or a Franco launches his carefully prepared counter-revolution.